Listing for balance – #NaPoWriMo19 – 9

#NaPoWriMo19, Childhood, Parenting Add comments

Hello!

 

“Today, I’d like to challenge you to write your own Sei Shonagon-style list of “things.” What things? Well, that’s for you to decide!”

…said the #NaPoWriMo site.

So I twirled around in this airy idea for a while, and just wrote what came to mind 😉 

 

My boys make endless verbal lists of how they rank things:

Updating, rechecking, asking each other if they agree;

I get stumped when they probe what my favourite this, that or the other is –

I don’t know why.

It makes me feel…unkind? Unworldly? Unmasked?

 

I was keeping a written list of all the poems I’d ever penned, back in the 90s.

I still have it, each title numbered.  I remember the gist of some.

My endless paper pile sometimes yields the scribbled texts.

 

I have a notebook full of troll names, too.

I gave them family trees by matching colours of hair

and deciding which were the kids.

 

Over the years

There were schedules I rarely followed,

Characters I left half-formed,

Reams of quotes from books;

Text messages I was loath to lose to deletion, when my phone only held the most precious fifteen…

 

At present, there are the affirmations I might one day use,

Printed pages of “10 ways to…” tackle everything from housework to a child’s tantrum,

And my “3 wins” documented for every day since the start of this year.

 

But the ones I unearth most often now are the holiday/visit lists;

For mother/adulthood, at key points in the year, always calls for a

“Wardrobe simplification exercise”

 Or a “dust-bunny eradication plan”.

 

My life: charted by my corresponding obsessions and necessities.

 

An archive of snippets, a flurry of thought.

 

What do you write lists about?  Have you kept any from your younger years?

 

Catch you tomorrow!

 

[Pic is from here]

 

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One Response to “Listing for balance – #NaPoWriMo19 – 9”

  1. cheriee weichel Says:

    I only write lists for things to do, except for one list poem that I wrote last year. If you would like to read it, it’s here.
    http://dickenslibrary.blogspot.com/2018/04/0830-poem-day-challenge.html

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